I am Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI). I teach and conduct research in corpus linguistics, semantics, community archiving, and co-production methodologies.
I have been at the University of Sheffield since 2015. From 2011 to 2015, I was a research and teaching fellow in the Survey of English Usage at University College London (UCL), where I also completed my PhD in English and MA in English Linguistics. Prior to that, I studied English and music at the University of Kansas; and I taught ESOL in the USA, Cyprus, and China.
I am a member of The Keywords Project, the Oxford English Dictionary Advisory Forum, and the White Rose Gender Equality College. I was Co-Director of the University of Sheffield Centre for Equity and Inclusion from 2021 to 2025, and I was a council member of Britain’s oldest learned society, The Philological Society, from 2012 to 2020.
Research Interests
I am primarily active in two broad research areas: corpus semantics and community archiving.
My recent corpus semantic research focuses on words with multiple contested meanings, which lead to cross purposes and confusion in public debate and personal conversation: for example, decolonisation, gentrification, and appropriation. These contentious multiple meanings often include newly emerging and rapidly changing senses, and sometimes exhibit increasing vagueness, all of which can be examined to better understand the nature of language. I am also working on computationally assisted approaches to discourse, and ‘discursive concepts’, building on the work of the Linguistic DNA project.
My community archiving research is primarily conducted in collaboration with a team of academic and non-academic researchers in rural South Africa, and employs community- led co-production methods. That work has supported the creation of community archives in the form of ‘live’ records of unfolding events; and records of the living memories of older adults; as a means for building capacity and exploring concepts of development and identity. As Co-Director of the Centre for Equity and Inclusion, I supported community archiving by racially marginalised PhD students at the University of Sheffield; and facilitated co-production between racially marginalised PhD students and local and regional social and racial justice organisations.
Selected recent and ongoing externally funded projects include:
- Computational Approaches to Semantic Change Across Different Environments (CASCADE). Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Networks. (As Research Supervisor).
- Sheffield Centre for Equity and Inclusion. Office for Students and Research England. (As Co-Director).
- Community-led impact for rural land rights in South Africa: A multilingual best practice handbook. AHRC. (As Principal Investigator).
- Many Happy Returns – Enabling Reusable Packaging Systems. Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund: Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge. (As Co-Investigator).
- Land rights in rural South Africa: Creating a record of practice in an ongoing crisis. AHRC Urgency Grant. (As Principal Investigator).
- Mapping community heritage with young people in rural South Africa. AHRC GCRF Network Plus Funding. (As Principal Investigator).
PhD students who have completed their degrees under my supervision include:
- Starlina Rose (White Rose College of Arts and Humanities PhD Studentship). Misunderstood Regional Dialect in British Gothic Fiction by Women Between 1790 and 1820.
My current PhD students include:
- Gia Bao Nguyen (Penelope) (UKRI Doctoral Fellow, CASCADE MSCA Doctoral Network)
- Maria Flores Alejo (UKRI Doctoral Fellow, CASCADE MSCA Doctoral Network)
Postdoctoral Researchers I have supervised include:
- Dr Emma Franklin, Many Happy Returns (NERC)